Blender for Beginners
You don't need a \$4000 computer to run Blender, at home I have an HP pavillion laptop, core i7, intel graphic card with NVidia driver, so GPU render works, 8 GB ram, and it costs around \$550. I don't use it for final renders, I tried once 200% Full HD with 1024 samples, not surprisingly, Blender crashed, but for almost everything else, it is petfect, for a biginner he'll probably spend more time modeling and texturing, trying simple tasks, even when Blender crashes, it has one of the best recovery systems I've ever seen, and I worked for a long time with 3D "industry standard" software, and their recovery systems are not even close, I never lost significant amount of work using Blender "next to nothing".I advise you to download Blender on your Dell, give it a try to test it's limits, if it can handle a render of 512 samples Full HD with 3 mesh lights and half a million mesh object, I think you're fine, if not, invest in a mid range desktop, after all, you don't want him to start using a broken instrument, this will be a very bad start, and I don't advise using an older version of Blender, I believe a version that will make a difference in hardware consumption will be too old, if he likes it, this will make the learning curve looks like wasting time and effort, learning to do workarounds that he doesn't need for a newer version.